The future of search

Commentary: What experts think of Ask, MSN, others

By

BambiFrancisco

SAN FRANCISCO (MarketWatch) -- If you missed the panel discussion Wednesday on the future of online search at the Ad:tech conference in San Francisco, this column has the highlights.

If you want others to read your opinion on a particular topic, write a blog. It could become the No. 1-ranked search result. If you want to find out what others are thinking on a particular topic, be specific in your query, and you might find really relevant results.

In preparation for the panel on which we discussed the future of search, I started by Googling for the answer.

I typed into Google: "What does John Battelle think about the future of search?" Battelle authored the book "The Search." He also started Federated Media Publishing, a federation of independent authors. FM, which he tells me will soon move out of "alpha" mode, tries to connect these disparate voices and audiences with the right advertiser.

The top result for that query was Battelle's blog, which is highly relevant, since Battelle writes about search. I Googled the same question for the other search-expert panelists, Dana Todd, founder of search engine marketing firm SiteLab; Frederick Marckini, founder of iProspect; and Kevin Ryan, founder of Kinetics. IProspect and Kinetics are search-engine advertising firms as well. The top stories for Ryan and Marckini were articles they'd written about the future of search. For Todd, an article with her opinion on search was the No. 1 result.

If you want a 360-degree profile of a person, go to Amazon's
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A-9. On A-9, you can get search results across various categories, including Wikipedia, blogs and image libraries, and get them displayed on a single page, simplifying matters considerably.

From Pets.com to Petfinder.com

If e-mails could speak a thousand words, one e-mail in my inbox did. The subject header was: Meet with Petfinder.com. I immediately experienced a flashback to 1999, especially to the role of Pets.com in the late '90s.

Back in 1999, it was fashionable to be a retailer. Today, it's fashionable to be a librarian with a specialty. Every company is a search engine these days.

Marckini of iProspect talked about Amazon.com's being a search engine for books. He said he thinks, that while vertical searches will increase, Google will launch new verticals. The rumor in the advertising world is that Google
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will soon launch a travel search engine, much as it launched a specialty units for finance and video.

Battelle said his FM operation, which he says drives 250 million page views a month, is a vertical search engine as well. I guess you could call it a search engine about Web authors with a specialty. FM's network includes some blog sites, like Boingboing.net.

What else did we discuss?

The big search engines

Despite the fact that InterActiveCorp's
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Ask.com, the former Ask Jeeves, is gaining traction, some panelists said it wasn't gaining enough traffic to really make a difference to advertisers. Battelle argued that Ask.com's traffic is valuable. In his words (which he later clarified in an e-mail): "Traffic of good intent is hard to come by, and, Ask has a lot."

Microsoft's MSN adCenter -- which is in beta -- also got a lukewarm response from the panel, after I asked the panelists whether the advertising network would raise the bar.

Battelle thought people were overly optimistic about Microsoft's
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MSN prospects just because the company had hired Steve Berkowitz to be vice president in charge of MSN.

Berkowitz is credited with building the Ask.com team and transforming that site into what it is today. But it's not Berkowitz's ability that Battelle is concerned about. It's that Berkowitz won't have control over the search product. "I think product development is intricately tied to revenue," Battelle said. "And, I worry that if he does not directly control it, his ability to move the business where he needs it to go will suffer."

SiteLab's Todd said that the "theory" behind MSN's advertising network -- which is to enable marketers to target search users via demographic subgroup -- has raised the bar. But, in practice, Todd doesn't think the demographic targeting is meeting its objectives, she said. "We had bypassed demographic targeting entirely and gone straight to the performance of keywords, regardless of who was clicking."

Meanwhile, Microsoft said Thursday that adCenter was responsible for 70% of MSN's U.S. search queries at the end of the third quarter, up from 18% from the previous quarter. But sales at MSN declined 3% to $561 million, partly due to a 31% decline in Internet access revenue as subscribers fell 23% to 2.3 million. Advertising sales rose 7% annually, compared with Yahoo's ad-sales growth of 33% and Google's ad-sales growth of 33%. Search sales were negatively affected due to the transition to the adCenter platform, according to Microsoft executives.

I asked iProspect's Marckini what he thought the reason was behind Yahoo's 10% increase in revenue per page view last quarter. That little tidbit had come from Yahoo CEO Terry Semel on the day Yahoo announced its results. Yahoo doesn't break out sponsored search ads from branded ads, so we can't know for sure where the improvement in revenue is coming from.

But Marckini brought up an interesting point regarding paid inclusion: "Yahoo is the only search engine that is currently monetizing [its] 'natural' search results," he said. "They do this by selling their 'paid inclusion' product that charges advertisers for inclusion into the Yahoo index but does not impact their position in search results. ... I consider paid inclusion an underleveraged asset that more marketers need to test."

As for the whether advertisers would receive greater benefit from Google now that it owns 5% of Time Warner's
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AOL, the panelists didn't see much difference for advertisers. Kinetics' Ryan said that the move underscores what Google will do to protect its partners and keep them away from MSN.

What about social search and other search engines? Membership has grown to more than 100 million users on social networks, and new memberships are growing by nearly half a million a day, according to Prefound.com, a search site. Prefound.com is an interesting site because its results are created by guides, or search guides.

My question was how can advertisers get in front of this crowd, and would it marginalize the general search engines?

The panelists agreed that most people would still buy from the major search engines to get to the verticals. And, at the end of the day, most people will still be going to the major search engines, Todd predicted. That's because people are "inherently lazy."

I agree.

But I challenged the panel to think harder about a generation conditioned to expect more out of search engines. As I've written in the past, the next generation is being raised in an era in which virtually their entire biographies will be digitally published -- from birth. Every moment can (and, in many cases, will) be captured and shared with the world. How can this generation -- with such high lofty expectations -- get sufficiently personalized answers from a general search engine?

Perhaps it never was, and certainly is not now, a one-size-fits-all world, so how can search engines trying to meet the needs of everyone meet the needs of anyone?

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